The Innocent is a startlingly prescient novel from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan.
Into a Berlin wrenched between East and West, comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team.
Powerful and disturbing...a tour de force
To call
The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling
Lord of the Flies a boy's adventure yarn...it ensure McEwan's major status
The sheer cleverness of the book is dazzling, and only fully to be appreciated as you turn the last page
It's the most tightly plotted of Ian McEwan's novels, and to argue properly for its excellence would involve showing how the political and emotional themes are inseparable from its narrative ingenuity, the patterns of revelation and about-turn which mark its final pages
Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact... Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of the East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories,
First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include
The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award;
The Cement Garden;
Enduring Love;
Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize;
Atonement;
Saturday;
On Chesil Beach;
Solar;
Sweet Tooth;
The Children Act; and
Nutshell, which was a Number One bestseller.
Atonement and
Enduring Love have both been turned into award-winning films,
The Children Act and
On Chesil Beach are in production and set for release this year, and filming is currently underway for a BBC TV adaptation of
The Child in Time.